Slumping Pacers looking to regain fun with Heat in town

Pacers Paul George celebrates a play in the second half of their game against the Heat.
Indiana Pacers defeated the Miami Heat 90-84Tuesday, December 10, 2013, evening at Bankers Life Fieldhouse.(Photo: Matt Kryger / The Star)

They are the twin towers of the NBA's Eastern Conference, each anticipating a lengthy postseason run in which they hold championship aspirations. Yet each is stumbling in similar fashion on the road there.

The noticeable frustrations stemming from both camps on the eve of the East-leading Indiana Pacers hosting the second-place Miami Heat on Wednesday night at Bankers Life Fieldhouse run in accordance with the two teams' recent tumult. Both teams are struggling. Both teams are frustrated.

And they'll be the first to tell you as much.

"We just haven't been having fun," Pacers All-Star Paul George said after Tuesday's practice. "Somewhere along the line, we just forgot how much fun this game is and forgot how much fun we made it. More than that, how much fun we made this arena."

Perhaps each can take solace in the fact that their misery has company. As Indiana fights through this midseason wall — the Pacers have dropped seven of their last 12 — they are fortunate over recent weeks the play of the two-time defending champs has slipped into a similar southward spiral.

Miami is a Pacers-like 5-7 over the last 12 and Indiana's lead in the chase for the conference's top seed is just two games. To hear it from them, the East's twin towers enter Wednesday's showdown more confounded than confident.

Heat forward Chris Bosh sounded off after the team's loss Saturday to lowly New Orleans.

"We just got to all get on the same page," he told reporters. "I don't know what we're going to do, but we've got to figure it out. … We just show up and do whatever. (After) a loss, nobody's upset. (After) a win, nobody's happy. There's no passion. There's nothing.

"We suck. And if we don't play better, we'll be watching the championship at home."

A disgruntled Pacers unit has sounded eerily similar of late. Following Monday night's 89-77 loss in Chicago, David West was candid in his criticism.

"We look like sh—," West told The Star. "We're just not performing. We're just not playing well. We're not shooting the ball well. We're not sharing it and when we're not sharing it, we become stagnant."

These Pacers bear faint resemblance to the team that raced to 9-0 and 33-7 starts this year, rolling through the first two months of the season while being touted as a serious title contender.

But that seems like a lifetime ago. After Monday's defeat, they've now lost seven games in 20 days. They didn't drop seven games at the start of the season until two months had passed.

"It's difficult to sustain the start that we had playing 82 games," coach Frank Vogel said. "We're playing 18 games this month. It can be a little bit of a grind sometimes. We've struggled a little bit, especially on the road. We just have to stay the course against a good basketball team."

All of which matters little in the build-up for one of the regular season's most critical match-ups. It's still Pacers-Heat. Still Paul George vs. LeBron James. Still a possible Eastern Conference Finals preview no matter what brand of basketball the two teams have been playing in recent weeks.

"This is a big one," George called it. "That's a team that's looking to get in playoff form. They can use a game like tomorrow to get back to playing like a champion."

For Indiana, it starts with an offense that has become stagnant and overly-reliant on perimeter exploits. In Chicago, the Pacers failed to reach 80 points in consecutive games for the first time since 2007. For perspective, that was three years before Frank Vogel became head coach.

Their All-Star center, Roy Hibbert, was rendered all-but invisible by Memphis' Marc Gasol and Chicago's Joakim Noah in the losses. Hibbert, who has struggled on both ends of the court for a month, has totaled just seven points on 10 shots over the past two games.

"We've become a jump shooting team, and we have two of the (league's) best bigs down low," point guard George Hill said of Hibbert and West. "We have to use our assets and let them facilitate."

Hibbert was more terse following Tuesday's workout.

"We had a real good practice today, we got better," he said. "Hopefully that can translate to us doing things on the court and winning tomorrow — playing with a little bit more force, playing inside, like we did at the beginning of the year and last year."

The beginning of the year? Last year?

That's when this group was sharing the basketball and the wins were piling up. When their league-leading defense won them games and the high-flying theatrics of George and Lance Stephenson punctuated their victories.

When, as George said Tuesday, basketball was fun.

"I think we lost that," George added. "And that's something we need to find."

Oden back on the court: Of late, former Lawrence North star and 2006 IndyStar Mr. Basketball Greg Oden has enjoyed a level of consistency he's experienced far too rarely in his injury-plagued career. Oden has started four of the Heat's last six games, playing more than 10 minutes in each. Of note, it was current Indiana Pacers general manager Kevin Pritchard who selected Oden as the No. 1 overall pick for the Portland Trail Blazers in the 2007 NBA Draft.

ESPN lands in Indy: ESPN's SportsCenter will be on site at Bankers Life Fieldhouse Wednesday for all-day coverage leading up to the 8 p.m. tip-off. It will be Indiana's second-to-last national television appearance of the season. Their final national appearance before the playoffs comes against Oklahoma City on April 13.

Eastern Conference Finals preview? Wednesday night's game will be the third this season between the two teams that went toe-to-toe for seven games in last year's Eastern Conference Finals. Both won on their own home court earlier this season, the Pacers capturing a 90-84 win at Bankers Life Fieldhouse back in early December and the Heat winning 97-94 in Miami a week later.

The pick: Indiana is a team that typically rises to the big stage. And this is a big one. The Pacers win their fourth straight against Miami at home, 100-95.